Adele was the big winner at the Ivor Novello songwriting awards today. No great surprises there, given that she has been the dominant artist of the past 18 months. Most of the coverage of Adele dwells on her fantastic voice and charismatic presentation. The quality of her songwriting is often overlooked. She consistently composes the kind of straightforward songs that never go out of fashion: melodically elegant, lyrically direct and emotionally truthful.

Female artists did extremely well at the awards, with PJ Harvey and Lana Del Ray amongst the other big winners. But it would be a mistake to make too much of the new gender bias that has put women at the centre of contemporary pop culture. Adele was accompanied at the Novellos by Paul Epworth, co-composer of her hit Rolling In The Deep. Lana Del Ray’s award was collected by her co-writer Justin Parker. Popular songwriting still tends to be a collaborative effort. Credits on hit songs have a tendency to run on at incredible length in order to acknowledge everyone who has had a hand in the creation of a commercial money spinner. The devil is in the small print.

There is nothing wrong with collaboration, as Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Lieber and Stoller and Lennon and McCartney might attest. Adele and Lana Del Ray are two of the most interesting pop voices of recent times, whose characters dominate their recordings. But for the highest level of the songwriter’s art, it is surely right to acknowledge individuals whose originality and uniqueness is reflected in the particularities of their sole authorial voice. Which is why it is even more timely to celebrate the achievement of PJ Harvey, whose Let England Shake deservedly picked up the Novello award for Best Album. Harvey’s work has a complexity that makes it closer to art than pop, which is just one of the reasons why her win is unlikely to attract the media attention of her female contemporaries. Her lyrics are so carefully wrought they could stand as poetry in their own right, pungently reflecting on our war torn times and the tensions that underpin our island nation’s imperial history, while the music around them adds all kinds of emotional and philosophical nuance and textures, taking it beyond the possibilities of the written word alone. Let England Shake is an utterly extraordinary piece of work, which could have been fashioned by no other artist. The credits are extremely short and sweet by modern pop standards. They read Written And Composed by PJ Harvey.